Taizé in Retrospect

Two posts in one evening! A record! I promised myself that as soon as I’d collected myself and composed my thoughts, I would take the time to write something to try to explain the Taizé community before it slips from my memory. There is lots of practical and historical information at their website, http://www.taize.fr/, so I won’t dwell on those details. Suffice it to say: the community was established in the 1940s by Brother Roger, a Swiss man who came (by bicycle!) to settle among the hills of Burgundy. He offered refuge to those fleeing Nazi persecution. He opened his door to people of faith from around the world. And from there, the order grew. Today, people by the thousands to participate in services, speak with brothers and sisters, and to find a bit of respite from the world at large.

Having heard other folks speak of the peace and tranquility they find at Taizé, I was truly overwhelmed when I arrived by the immense human bustle of the place: crowded-dirty-cold showers; a sea of tents; mealtimes evocative of summer camp or the Marlboro College dining hall—only outdoors and with about ten times as many people (no tables, just wooden benches, but not enough to accommodate everybody, so every semi-level surface is occupied with diners). After two days of train-hopping, I could do nothing with myself but pitch my tent in the quietest corner I could find, take a cold shower (don’t expect to ever get a truly hot one), and collapse. I didn’t get up until the church bells summoned me to prayer the next morning.

Once again, I felt wholly overwhelmed: the church is a big barn of a thing, with garage doors inside to expand the space depending on the size of the congregation that day. The space is gently lit with small candles in red glass votives and a few soft overhead lights and small stained-glass windows. Everyone sits on the floor: sturdy institutional carpeting, walkways demarcated with masking tape, and there are wooden benches along the walls for those who need them. A good number bring their own prayer benches. Though itb looks nothing like the centuries-old cathedrals I spent the month of July walking through, the acoustics in the Taizé church are amazing—and this of course is the building’s raison d’être. At a Taizé service, there is no “sermon” and no “choir.” The brothers lead chants in every language imaginable, from Latin to Polish to French to English, read a short psalm (short enough to be repeated in numerous translations), hold a five-minute silence (which is never purely silent, thanks to the cooing and muttering babies, and the coughing and sneezing that are inevitable when you have hundreds of people living in close quarters), and close with more songs. Everyone is given a songbook , and everyone sings. Whether or not you are familiar with Taizé services, whether or not you can read music, whether or not you speak any language other than your own, after a few days of repetition the songs begin to make sense. They get easier (even the intimidating Slavic ones!). There are lots of Taizé recordings available, and places all over the world hold Taizé-style services, some more regularly than others. If this has caught the interest of anyone in or near Vermont, the Benedictine monks of Weston Priory, http://www.westonpriory.org/, hold beautiful prayer services, or so I’ve been told… At the heart of these prayers is their participatory nature, the sense of community they inspire, the feeling of hundreds of voices becoming one voice and filling the air. That first morning, the ringing harmonies bowled me over—and I was already sitting down.

The rest of the day, everyone is expected to assist in chores (serving meals, washing dishes, changing trash bags) and attend at least one Bible-study session (I most skipped Bible-study; chalk it up to my Quaker roots, but sitting around with a bunch of other 17 to 29 year olds and talking about God—just doesn’t feel right). And the rest of the time? Walk, sit in the sun, read, sing… There is constant singing in a multitude of languages, accompanied by guitars, hand drums, flutes, recorders, even a trumpet and a saxophone showed up. I can’t tell you how many times, over the past weeks, I have heard renditions of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” nor in how different accents.

The monks at Taizé are also incredible artisans, producing gorgeous woodcuts and pottery. I spent hours drooling over the claywork, the rainbow of glazes, and finally succumbed to the temptation to buy something souvenir-ish—the first time the whole trip! It should also be noted that Taizé is very close to Cluny, a lovely town and home to the ruins of another monastery mucho older than Taizé. (Of course, for me, the name Cluny just evokes memories of the villain in the first Redwall book—anyone follow?) My second day, feeling claustrophobic at Taizé (and miserably underwhelmed by the food—more on that in a moment), I bussed it to Cluny and spent the afternoon wandering, gloriously pack-free for once! There was also an equestrian even going on at the town’s hippodrome so I got to watch so absolutely gorgeous dressage horses and hunter-jumpers. They made me long for the days when I rode…

For those in need of deeper reflection, looking for a challenge or just a little extra peace and space and solitude, Taizé offers the option of spending a week or a weekend in silence. After a couple of days of the exhausting summer-camp atmosphere, I leapt eagerly at the chance and undertook two-plus days (Friday through Sunday morning) in silence. There were already about a dozen women spending the entire week in silence at “Cerisier,” the Silent House in the village of Ameugny, a short 1.5 km walk from Taizé. We three dozen or so joining in for the weekend kept our sleeping arrangements on the main campus due to space constraints (which was fine, since my tent was already strategically pitched in the “Silent Area”—a relative term), but took meals at Cerisier and were welcome to spend our days in the house and its garden or wherever else we chose. Our daily schedule consisted of prayers and meals, the rest up to us—how liberating! I felt like I was returning to my natural state, and the whole experience took on a new light. I felt better about everything. Not to mention the infinitely better food—and by “infinitely” I simply mean real, fresh baguettes in the morning, and an electric kettle to make real hot tea whenever we wanted.

I guess I need to spend a few lines explaining Taizé dining. Now, I’ve always said that I could pretty much live on bread and chocolate, which is just what they serve every morning for breakfast. However, the bread is nowhere near what one hopes for when one is spending a week in France: dry, day-old slices of those pale par-baked baguettes, the likes of which can be found “fresh-baked” at any supermarket in the United States, tasting heavily (to my palate) of commercial yeast and preservatives. To add insult to injury, there is the matter of “tea”: although called tea, what gets served at breakfast is in fact hot instant tea, a la Nestea, artificially lemony and impossibly sweet. I took a bowlful my first morning, took a sip, and my little heart sunk right down into my toes. I suddenly recalled that Gabe, a coworker of mine from Healthy Living who just so happened to make a trip last September almost identical to mine, had warned me about this “tea,” but of course I’d forgotten. In any case, as soon as I began breakfasting at the Silent House, I spent my days drinking endless cups of English Breakfast tea, eating hunks of crisp-crusty baguette, and collecting windfall plums in the churchyard of Ameugny’s beautiful church. A not on plums: Already in Spain, plums had become something of a symbol… I’m still trying to figure out what of. Generosity, I suppose: generosity of the earth and of the human community. In Spain, the ground in July is littered with little golden ciruelas, and at many albergues we pilgrims would be greeted by a basket or a bowl full of them. It is so touching to be offered fruit fresh from the tree, to be told, it’s okay to eat these—don’t feel like you have to sneak around collecting windfalls while no one is looking. Burgundy has those same yellow ones, but the tree in Ameugny was special: deep purple plums just like the ones in Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, green-gold inside, the size and shape of dates and nearly as soft and sweet. Suffice it to say, I was in love. From Friday on, I visited my plum tree every day. By the end of the week, I felt almost at home on the road between Ameugny and Taizé, felt almost the way I do walking up and down the West Shore of South Hero. Of course, there are many more pedestrians and cyclists at Taizé (if you can believe it) than in South Hero. It’s pretty much impossible to walk alone.

The agriculture is impressive along the short stretch I walked several times daily. Unlike the U.S., it feels like every bit of land in Europe is cultivated. In that 1.5 km, one can see horses and cows, a sunflower field, a cornfield, a vineyard, not to mention apple trees everywhere, plums and blackberries, and small garden plots. That said, I found it terribly irksome that Taizé offers nothing in the way of fresh vegetables to its visitors. For lunch and dinner, we’re talking instant mashed potatoes, frozen peas and corn, pasta with canned sauce. Usually, we got one piece of fresh fruit at lunch—an orange, a pear, a peach, perhaps a banana (the whole time I was in Europe, I got excited whenever offered a banana because I never buy them for myself as they are a very poor choice for backpacking, what with the bruising and the squishing). That piece of fruit was far and away the highlight of each day’s meals, and often it was all that I took.

I know, I know, I’m an ungrateful snob to complain about the food prepared and served by volunteers at an entirely not-for-profit establishment. I’m not angry at Taizé; I understand the difficulty of feeding hoardes of people on a minimal budget. What I’m angry at, I suppose, is a global food system—I realize now how global the problem is, that it isn’t just the U.S. although things may be worse here—that simply is not designed to provide all people with real, whole, fresh food. That said, if I had a monastery, we would most certainly be baking our own bread and growing our own vegetables. At the very least. My first few days at Taizé, I longed bitterly for that good “pollo de la mañana” I ate for dinner with Mapi and Andrés, those big rounds of chewy Galician sourdough and wheels of snowy-white soft fresh farmers cheese. It is awfully hard to be spiritually engaged when presented with food that riles one’s political sensibilities. I felt incredibly guilty about buying fresh bread from the bakery while I was in Cluny, and fresh carrots and cucumbers at the supermarket, when eating together as a community is so important at Taizé, but I had to do something. I was about to throw in the towel and fast for the second half of the week—and then I came to the Silent House, and with real tea and real bread, I can weather any storm.

I don’t want to dwell on the food issue for too long, though it is near and dear to my heart, something of which Taizé reminded me emphatically. However, there were other joys and other challenges outside of meal times. After a month of spending much of each day all by myself, I felt very unsteady—more so than usual—in the midst of a crowd. Moreover, the vast majority of guests at Taizé come with family, friends, or as part of a youth group, so the Taizé experience is, for most, a naturally social one. Being solo, and being the introvert that I am, I knew that the sort of reflection I wanted—needed—to be doing was not going to happen if I spent all my time chatting. The prayers were more valuable than I can express. It was important to me to have that structure each day, to have something to do when I woke up, a place to go. And being together in the church, singing, was the right way of being with other people. Having German teenagers kicking their soccer ball into my tent was not. Listening to British kids play truth-or-dare at midnight (after snorting cocaine!) was not. Waiting for girls to finish putting on their makeup in the bathroom so I could have a turn at the sink to wash my one change of clothes was not. Granted—these are learning experiences. I wouldn’t trade my week at Taizé for anything. But it is a mixed bag.

The most powerful experience I took away with me was the Saturday Easter vigil, held at evening prayer. Everyone receives a candle, and the flame is passed around the room, from person to person. Not being a Catholic, I’d never witnessed—let alone participated in—an Easter vigil. The symbolism of the fire, of turning to one’s neighbor to share the flame, is so ancient and so powerful. I couldn’t help but think of Emerson, that line (I think it’s in “The Poet”) where he tells us we are not merely torch-bearers but “children of the fire.” I thought of Prometheus, of Dante. I thought of Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher who believed that fire—change—was the essence of being. And the music! After nearly a week together, we all had a firmer grasp of the words, the harmonies. There was a newfound power in the evening’s prayers. It would be our last evening prayer all together. Most pack up and leave on Sunday morning, and by Sunday evening there is a new wave of guests, so prayers on Sunday evening are once again quiet and tentative as everyone figures out how it’s done. Staying until Monday made me much more aware of the transformation that occurs over the course of one week than I would have been had I left on Sunday with everyone else. It made clear to me how people grow at Taizé. They grow in confidence and in trust, in their ability to listen to one another and to make each voice resonate with all the others. I realized too that the confidence and trust that many discover in themselves at Taizé were exactly what I had been cultivating in myself for the past month on the Camino. Taizé describes its project as “a pilgrimage of trust on earth,” which sums it up so well I don’t have much to add. Pilgrimages take many different forms. What one person finds in four weeks of walking through mountains, another finds while standing in the lunch line.